I’ve known Matt Palmer for 40 years. He hates when I share the story of how we met. I respect that. And since we’re such good friends, I will save that story for the third or fourth paragraph of this post.
This ongoing 60|60 project features 60 essays about things that are relevant to me, that have been important to my life and in my world. Just a precious few of the posts are about specific people, for whom I can dedicate 1000 or more words. Matt is one of them.
Today is Matt’s 60th birthday. December 7th, “…a day which will live in…” He bristles at that too. So where is he celebrating this milestone? He’s in Japan. Hiroshima. Yeah, I know. I wonder if he’ll score a free beer at the local izakaya.
Anyway, we’ve both lived some lives since we met back in 1986. Off and on for the first few years we were roommates and/or officemates. We worked together, drank together, ate together, road-tripped together, dated together, dieted together. But we never took a steam together.
He engineered the best surprise party for my 25th birthday. The best. I was in his wedding, a killer destination event. We competed for jobs; I won some, he won others. We’ll cover all that.
Since those days, Matt raised a family, begat three sons, took on a number of jobs, including some at the high-muckety-muck level, and he moved around a lot. Ditto for me, except for the family part and the muckety. We were in sync, geographically, in Orlando, then New York and later Los Angeles. We’ve kept up through the years, though there’ve been periods of radio silence.
In recent years, our friendship feels rekindled. I hope so. It’s an important one for me.
Him?
Here’s the story of the first time I met Matt. As I described in a recent post, I’d rented an apartment for the summer across I-4 from Disney. Four other roommates signed on, including Steve Watson. While I returned to JMU for May session, the others agreed to get the place set up, rent furnishings and the like.
In late May, when I pulled in after a 13-hour drive from Virginia, the place was raging with a party spilling into the parking lot. I mingled into the apartment, looking for my roommates. That’s when I discovered there was no furniture. No couch, no beds, no TV, no tables, no nothing. “WTF” I asked when I finally located Steve. He told me to relax, we’ll figure it out. “Oh, and by the way, I think we found a sixth roommate.”
“WHAT? We’ve already got five guys sleeping on the floor of a two-bedroom.”
“Just meet him,” Steve said, pointing, “he’s over there.”
Him? The guy sitting on the floor, propped against a wall, not talking to anybody, barely even looking up. Him? JFC, you want HIM to be our sixth roommate?
Anyway, Matt became our sixth roommate.
We each probably saved about $15 in rent. A couple of cases or a carton of Marlboros back then. It was a good summer. A hella good summer. Matt and I, and Steve, along with a another roomie named Mike Driscoll, spent much of it working in operations on Main Street USA and partying until dawn; there’s more explicit detail on that in the Disney post linked above. Suffice: Matt and I became good friends that summer.
A (wonderful) blur
Fast-forward to sometime late in 1988, after we’d both graduated college. I had a gig in Disney PR, Matt was working in the event office I’d helped to establish the year before. They were planning for the G.O. of the Disney/MGM Studios. After it opened, Matt became an actor in The Great Movie Ride. He met a girl named Missy there. He also spent stints slinging luggage at the airport and shilling gym memberships and/or stereo components (is there a difference?).
That’s the blurry part. The next few passages are also a little blurry and not chronological because, well, life isn’t chronological, most assuredly when it’s screened in hindsight. And it was a long time ago. And beer.
We became roommates. First in an apartment on Vineland Road and later in Middlebrook Pines off Kirkman, a pretty stellar place for two broke bachelors on the rise. We had a killer AV setup, thanks to Matt hitting Circuit City for a pricey big screen, a high-end VCR and sound system, and then forgetting to return it all within 30 days.
As for the bachelor lifestyle, I will err on the side of discretion, other than to say, there was a lot going on. We were popular and had a robust social life. There were parties. There were girls. There was stuff.
I could go big-salacious, but I’ll settle for the mundane. After we left the bars (Sneakers, JBs, CJs, Rosie’s and later Finnegans), I’d go buy a six pack at 7-Eleven while Matt grabbed a $5 pizza from Dominos. We’d meet back and the place, eat, drink and fall asleep–me on the couch with a beer in my hand, Matt in the recliner with the empty pizza box on his lap. It was the best time.
We road-tripped a few times to Key West where Matt’s brother was F&B manager at a resort at the end of Duval. Highlights included the typical dives, a performance by an obviously-pregnant stripper who exploited her condition for tips, and a surprise run-in at a bar with a old fraternity brother of mine who was now a well-armed DEA agent loaded with “candy.” That was a fun night and a rough morning.
Look at us!
Within a few months, I left Disney for a job in publicity at Universal Studios. The soundstages were up and working, but other than a few construction offices, the only other visible feature on-site was the Psycho House, sitting on a hill out in the middle of the giant dirtscape. Six months later, Matt came aboard. Our cubicles were across from each other in a space that had been a storage closet. Who cares, we were pulling down 19-grand a year. That’s right.
We appeared on the news a lot, doing hits on local TV, radio, in the papers and trades. It got a little competitive. One of us would get quoted on the front page of The Orlando Sentinel, the other would do a call-in with a morning-drive team in Atlanta. One got 30 seconds of face time on the Today Show, the other was live on GMA, riding Earthquake alongside an excitable weatherman. One would corral all the stars from the “Back to the Future” trilogy for a grand opening, the other would spend days with a dozen legends from TV and movie westerns. And on and on.
Every day at work, we rode the rides, whether open or still in testing. It was part of the job description. There were a few real stomach-turners, especially the early revs of Back to the Future: the sync was way off and there were scenes still missing. We were unfazed. “Let’s do it again!”
Five or 10 years later, we met up for a crew reunion and visited Islands of Adventure. Two rides in, I needed water and a bench in the shade. Our tour guide was way miffed. And just last year, Matt and I rode the VelociCoaster together at IOA, in the last row. Cruel and relentless. For me: bench, shade, water. Knowledge.
Then…
Matt and Missy got serious. I liked her: I still have a picture of her draining a bottle of vodka into a watermelon. Wife material. When she moved to California a year or so later, things became strained, as they often do. Long-distance angst, mixed emotions, late night arguments, etc.
One Friday afternoon, Matt told me he was flying to LA that night to “take care of something.” From his tone, I gathered this would not be a pleasant task. I felt for him: breaking up sucks. When he got to work on Monday, fresh off the red-eye, I was ready to console him. Instead, he told me he had proposed to Missy and they were getting married. Gobsmacked was I.
I was in his wedding. It was a destination event, a long weekend spent in and around Mahwah, New Jersey. The first night, he and I shared a room with his Mom at the Courtyard, due to crossed wires on the reservation. She and I smoked a lot of cigarettes on the patio.
Some of the boys staged a bachelor party in New York City. It was full of the requisite douchey dude diversions. There was a visit from a (aged) Penthouse Pet and then a well-financed session at Scores. Matt knows that I have the photos from that night. He is tired of me reminding him about that. But I have the photos.
Side note: On his honeymoon it was discovered that he still had the Pet’s lipstick in a place he couldn’t see on his own. Also, I have photos. He doesn’t care anymore. I shoulda’ played them earlier.
So it goes and goes
Matt and I competed for a few jobs back then. I got promoted to the production group at Universal, while Matt became the PR lead at Nickelodeon Studios. We’d moved out and gotten our own places by then. In a few years, I moved to New York. Matt and Missy had their first boy, Luke.
Before I left Orlando, Matt and I had dinner. He asked me what my plans were. I didn’t have a clear answer, because I didn’t really know. I just needed a life-disruption. I asked him the same. Straight up: I want to be a CEO. Clarity and grit. Admirable. Matt.
A few years later, he moved his family to New York, still working for Nickelodeon and later for the Blue Man Group. I moved to Los Angeles via Las Vegas in 2001. Matt detoured to D.C. for a job with Discovery and then made his way to LA for a role with Disney Television. Ever heard of “Hannah Montana” and “High School Musical”? Both are on Matt’s resume for award-winning marketing work. Somewhere along the way, he started getting invited to Heidi Klum’s Halloween parties. Yeah, she was inviting Matt to her world-famous, star-studded parties. HIM! Was I jealous? Hell yes!
He threw me a few lifelines along the way, hiring me freelance to produce videos and events for Nickelodeon and later for some start-ups he was managing. All much appreciated.
We didn’t see a lot of each other during those years in LA. He was busy with work and family, living in Pasadena; I was near the beach in Santa Monica and too lazy to drive east of the 405.
40 years
Both of us have had some good fortune, and bad. I’ve had some big years and some crap years, made some smart moves and dumb ones, squandered some opportunities, lucked into others. I believe Matt’s journey has been not so different. That’s life, if you’re lucky.
I’ve met up with him a few times in the past year or so, once at Universal for the annual reunion, in Las Vegas for my 60th birthday, and another time when he was passing through Scottsdale. That night was dense with reminiscing and revelation, sharing the kind of stories of triumph, tribulation, titillation and fuck-ups that men of a certain age share. There might have been a tear or two. And a beer or ten. Probably a mellow cabernet too.
Today, I think we’re both in a good place. I hope so. I’m happily married, and we’re figuring out our next chapter. Matt has been with a good woman, Sheri, for over ten years. In a picture posted on Facebook recently, my wife noticed a ring on Matt’s finger. I reached out: Did you get married? No, he said, it’s an Uora ring. I had to look it up. That is Matt.
Though our paths diverged, as paths do, there’s not much distance between us. I treasure that. He’s been a friend to me for two-thirds of my life. He’s contributed greatly to my life experience, some of it endearing, some smart, some very human. And some of it idiotic, craven, reckless, wasted, drunken, degenerate and deranged. I hope I’ve delivered in kind.
Happy Birthday, Mattchew!
Or, as they say in Hiroshima…
Binderama60for60 
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